In my Tyler vs Gyutae Contest Results post from a few days ago, I had mentioned how I had “lost” the competition between Gyutae and I with a final eligible vote count of:

WinningTheWeb.com: 55 TylerCruz.com: 52 (I had stated it was 51, but forgot to count one)

This post will outline the effects the contest had on my blog, as ultimately that is the real goal when holding a blogging contest or competition.

When I came up with the idea for this competition, the whole point was to create a contest that, no matter who won, for it to benefit both of us. Therefore, while voters had to vote for only one of us, I made one of the requirements to have to link to both Gyutae’s and my blog. Therefore, even if 50 people ended up voting for Gyutae and none for me, I would still get the benefit of 50 backlinks.

Backlinks-O-Rama

The actual total vote count came to: WinningTheWeb.com: 61 TylerCruz.com: 54. The reason that these numbers are higher is because some of those votes did not meet the 300-word requirement. Together, this means that a total of 115 blogs voted for us and blogged about the contest. In addition, combined together, our blogs generated a total of 507 comments regarding the contest, not including the comments on the 115 blogs that blogged about our contest.

Since there was a total of 115 blog posts, or votes, that meant that both Gyutae and I ended up receiving 115 backlinks to each of our blogs!

The only real difference of having somebody else vote for Gyutae (apart from losing the competition and having to pay $300) would be receiving a small portion of traffic. My assumption was that I would roughly a 1:4 ratio, or 25%, of the traffic whenever somebody voted for Gyutae.

For example, if Blogger Joe voted for Gyutae and 10 people ended up clicking on a link in the post to his site, I would receive around 2-3 clicks from that post to the link pointing to my site.

I ended up losing the competition and had to pay out $300, but I received 115 backlinks from 115 different blogs within an 11-day period. That works out to only $2.60 per blog, which is an absolute bargain. If you wanted to do this through PayPerPost or ReviewMe, you’d have to pay at least $10 for each post, totalling around $1,150.

And remember, around 95% of the blogs that voted for us were from “make money online” blogs, which means better targeted traffic and more related backlinks. If you tried to target those blogs through PayPerPost or ReviewMe, I don’t think you could get that type of volume within 11-days – it would probably take a few months, if not longer, and be much more expensive.

And this is not counting the traffic. If we estimate that an average of 5 clicks (very conservative figure) were made to my blog from every blog that voted for me, that would be 270 (5 * 54). And if we use the 25% rule for the traffic from the blogs that voted for Gyutae, that would be another 76 (5 * 61 = 305 * 0.25) totalling roughly 350 clicks of targeted, interested traffic to my blog. It’s noting major, but this is a bonus. And I’m not even counting John Chow’s vote for me (that wasn’t easy to get arranged).

If I had actually won the competition, I would have received all of this for absolutely free!

The Numbers

So far, we’ve already established that I received 115 backlinks, and at least 350 uniques from the contest. But what good are those backlinks aside from generating some buzz and traffic?

Right before the contest began, I took note of both Gyutae’s and my blog statistics. Here are the before and after metrics:

WinningTheWeb.com

RSS

Alexa

Technorati

Before

262

83,196

43,764

After

353

66,797

23,247

TylerCruz.com

RSS

Alexa

Technorati

Before

1,077

29,029

7,667

After

1,222

28,165

5,654

Wow! First off, WinningTheWeb had much greater increases overall, grabbing close to 100 new RSS subscribers, a drop of 20,000 in Alexa ranking, and most impressive, a 50% improvement in Technorati ranking! That is the power of backlinks.

My numbers didn’t have as much of a dramatic improvement as Gyutae’s, but this makes sense. It’s a lot more difficult to improve your metrics the better they are. Gyutae and I both had the exact same number of backlinks, but since my rank was already fairly good, the 115 backlinks didn’t have the same effect on me as it did for Gyutae.

That being said, I’m very pleased with these numbers. I gained 145 RSS subscribers and improved my ranking in Technorati by 2,000. As for traffic, I saw no increase apart from a tiny bit extra while the competition was running. And my Alexa ranking saw virtually no change as well.

Now, it’s important to note a few things. It’s difficult to note just how much of this improvement was due to the competition, and how much was due to natural trends. For example, even if I didn’t run the competition, all three of those metrics would probably still have increased; my RSS has always been slowly but steadily increasing. But I’m extremely confident that I would never have seen such great improvements in RSS and Technorati if it wasn’t for this competition.

The screenshot below shows the difference in Alexa rank during the range of the competition:

Summary

This is only the second contest I’ve ever run on my blog, the first one being the $300 RSS Contest that ran back in December, and both yielded extremely good results.

Contests are an extremely resourceful and cost-effective (Remember how much those posts would have cost if purchased through a paid review service?) tool that you should at least TRY. The more you can “invest” in the contest, the better.

Missed Plug

I had missed a plug when I announced the winner of the contest, and so here is my owned plug. If I missed anyone else or owe anyone Entrecard credits, be sure to let me know!

ConorMongey.com – Unfortunately, there isn’t much to “plug” here as there are less than a dozen posts. However, it appears to be another “make money online” blog, although it has some personal school-related posts as well.

The contest has been a win-win situation for all parties involved and, of course, keeping track as to how a certain investment (because this contest is an investment, any advertising campaign should be treated as one) performs is always recommended.

True, you might have gotten those for free if you won, but also, as you said on a previous post, you had much to gain from it!
I would say it worth it!
Maybe there will be another contest where you will get these for free!

Those are some nice stats. Increased backlinks, subscribers, visitors, rankings… what more can you want! I’m thinking of doing a competition or contest like this soon with another “B-list” blogger. I can’t wait to see what happens then.

[…] In addition, Gyutae and I have competed in a head-to-head competition before. It was to see who could get the most blog posts of other bloggers voting for one of us. In the end, Gyutae just narrowly beat me with a score of […]